“Tokusatsu” is a Japanese term for effects-heavy live action film-making. Most often, it’s associated strongly with a very particular few styles. Flashy costumes, suitmation monsters, and very often a cheesy but beloved kind of attitude. Tokusatsu outings include the classic Godzilla films, which have always been favorites of mine despite not really being within the normal scope of this blog, as well as TV shows such as Super Sentai (known in the west for its stock footage being used to create Power Rangers), Kamen Rider, and the ‘Ultra Series’ franchise spawned by the original Ultraman. The Ultra Series in particular is kind of the distillation of Tokusatsu sub-genres, featuring transforming heroes and kaiju (giant monsters) doing battle.
Why do I bring this up? Because SSSS Gridman is Trigger’s mecha-flavored love letter to all things Tokusatsu, and the Ultra Series in particular (seeing as it’s called out by name), and it is at least as insane as you would expect from that.
Starting at the start, we actually have the “amnesiac hero” card played this time as a boy, Yuta Hibiki, wakes up with no memory of anything. He finds he’s at the home of Rikka Takarada, a classmate of his (not that he knows this at first) and there, in an ancient fossilized computer terminal that comes to be named “Junk”, sees or hallucinates a video message from the robotic hero Gridman. He ends up running in with his friend, the Tokusatsu nerd Utsumi, and briefly encountering the beloved queen bee of the school, Akane Shinjo. While trying to show Gridman to Utsumi, much to Rikka’s chagrin, a dopey-looking (yet still somehow kind of cool, and very much destructive) kaiju attacks the city and Yuta is sucked into the computer to emerge into the city as (or merged with) Gridman, slaying the monster.
Shortly after, though, everything seems
to reset. Yuta, Rikka, and Utsumi all remember everything perfectly,
but the city is repaired (and they can now all sense some
mountain-sized stationary background Kaiju in the misty distance) and
no one else in it seems to remember. Also forgotten are a few girls
in their class who were killed by the Kaiju attack. Not only does no
one remember what happened to them, no one even remembers they
existed at all; they’ve been retroactively removed from reality.
The audience, but not the characters,
then learn that the forces responsible for all this are Akane Shinjo
and her own mysterious figure, an almost comically ominous looking
black-clad alien robot-ish person with an affable demeanor called
Alexis Kerib. The girls killed by the last Kaiju rampage were
targeted because they happened to be the ones who ruined Akane’s day
just before. She makes another Kaiju, having sculpted it as a
hobbyist, and Alexis brings it to life to begin another rampage, this
one targeting her homeroom teacher, who was passively rude to her in
the morning.
In the meantime, a new ally has
appeared: Samurai Caliber, a bizarre man with a sword who seems to
know about Gridman. When the Kaiju comes knocking and Gridman alone
isn’t enough, Caliber also enters the computer, and emerges as a
sword for Gridman to wield.
And here we have what looks like a core
Tokusatsu loop, especially when Caliber’s similarly strange friends
(calling themselves the “Neon Genesis Junior High Students”,
despite literally none of them resembling highschoolers, to give you
an idea of this show’s kind of tongue-in-cheek behavior) show their
faces. Akane makes a new kaiju, Gridman fights it, but his old power
isn’t enough so he gets a new “each sold separately” attachment
to kill the monster and save the day. Right?
We do get a couple episodes like that,
though the very next creation is one a little out of that mold: Akane
makes Anti, an intelligent Kaiju who can take on a human form, and
who battles Gridman to a draw (the both of them running out of power
to maintain their super forms) repeatedly. Akane basically treats
him like old news garbage because of his failure to do the one thing
he was literally made for and kill Gridman, but Anti is still kicking
and repeatedly shows up to annoy everyone in his quest to personally
destroy Gridman.
From there we do get a few “normal”
Kaiju encounters. One is a stealthy mist kaiju that Akane uses to
hunt down members of a boy band who took her and Rikka on a bad
karaoke excursion (which also caused Yuta to realize his crush on
Rikka, as though waking up in her house wasn’t enough clue there was
a connection between the two). Another is a supermassive kaiju that
attacks while the class is rafting in the mountains, with Akane
trying to discern Gridman’s identity (and suspecting Yuta), which
gets us a kind of fun run as team secondary characters has to haul
the old Junk computer out to Yuta so he can transform. Anti, for his
part, sticks his nose in every time, but doesn’t get any closer to
his goal than he was the first time. Along the way we get a few more
hints that the world is not what it seems (everyone passes out on the
train to the mountains, and the mountains seem to get disappeared
entirely after the class is done with them).
After those encounters, we get the big
twist of the show. A strange and scruffy young girl who says she’s a
Kaiju takes Yuta on a journey, showing him that there is no real
world outside the boundary of the city. She also basically declares
that Akane isn’t just an unstable high school girl – she’s god.
She created this entire world and everything in it as her own
personal refuge. She uses her Kaiju to shape the world, destroying
and building as pleases her, but now something else (which the
audience knows means Alexis Kerib) is manipulating Akane.
This, in my mind, is brilliant. It’s
absolutely a very new perspective, but it builds on what we know and
transforms the meaning. We already knew that Akane made Kaiju, and
was responsible for the destruction and presumably resetting of the
city, but this scope is entirely different, and also changes the
relationship between Akane and Alexis Kerib. Previously, it would be
easy to assume that Alexis was something of a malicious genie,
bringing Akane’s darkest wishes to life with power she wouldn’t
otherwise possess. Now, he comes off as more of a parasite – still
stoking and feeding on her negative impulses, but ultimately not
‘providing’ much. Perhaps a more conscious outlet, but Akane is
powerful without him.
Further, seeing Akane in this new light
is huge. In my mind, there are two ways to read Akane: As a human
with godlike power, in which case she’s a fairly heinous villain for
how eagerly she goes about killing people for imagined slights… or
as a deity playing at being human, in which case her limited empathy
for mere mortals is much more excusable. Personally, I favor the
latter interpretation, and feel that’s more how the show treats her
anyway.
The thing is, we’re told at various
points after this reveal, more or less, that the world in which SSSS
Gridman takes place is a sealed-off space created by Akane so she
could be safe, comfortable, and happy. In a sense, it’s her lucid
dream. If you were dreaming, would you feel bad about having a giant
monster squish characters in your dream who annoyed you? I don’t
think many people would. And if something intruded on your dream
that was outside your control and messed with you, the way Gridman
interferes with Akane’s world and stops her Kaiju rampages, would you
not be frustrated?
Now, true, we see that the people in
Akane’s world have thoughts of their own, and their own wishes and
desires. But we’re both privileged with the perspective of the
audience, omniscient beyond Akane herself, and let in slowly on the
fact that it might not normally be so. Yuta’s crush on Rikka is
given special weight because his feelings mean that unlike the vast
majority of living things in this world, he doesn’t belong 100% to
Akane. The city, it would seem, is largely populated with NPCs that
exist to please their maker whether they’re cognizant of her or not.
Either way, you get the sense that this right here is why no one tells Haruhi the truth.
There is also, when you think about it,
a metafictional aspect to Akane’s nature. It’s not explicit, but
Akane is a creator. She’s an artist, who creates her kaiju in large
part as an act of sheer creativity, out of a passion for their
designs and powers, and she’s an ‘editor’ who writes undesirable
elements out of her story. Normally, I have a mixed view on
metafiction, leaning on the more sour side. I think it’s all too
often a cheap shortcut to ill-considered praise. Fiction
acknowledging that it is in some way fictional, and trying to speak
to the medium as well as to the internal story, is not intrinsically
interesting or valuable. But I feel like Gridman does it in a smart
and interesting way, because it works on multiple levels. It works
on the level of the story being told, as nothing about Akane as the
antagonist of the story NEEDS to exactly break the fourth wall. It
leans on the fourth wall with a knowing wink, but ultimately the
barrier holds. As a metaphor for the creators and creative process,
Akane is interesting, because we’re flipping the perspective around,
and seeing the creator from the point of view of the creation. And
the entire discussion of genre that comes with metafiction is
supported by the fact that the show itself is a take on the Ultra
Series, making it media that exists as a reaction to media and an
expression of fandom. The characters, particularly Utsume and Akane,
are framed in terms of their interests while also coming from a place
of interest.
This is how you do metaficton, not by
making EXP (by that name) a thing in the universe of a game. You
examine what new stories can be told by blurring the line between
reality and fiction.
(As an aside, I think games are
probably the worst media to explore metafiction in, because the
nature of games as interactive media already involves the consumer on
a different level than the typical).
In any case, the second line for the
episode sees Akane resolving to herself that Yuta must be Gridman,
and telling Anti to go kill him when he’s a weak little high school
boy. That is, I have to admit, the smart villain thing to do, but
she loses some points for the fact that she hasn’t been feeding Anti,
and he can’t really do a whole lot. Rikka runs across him (not
recognizing his human form) and takes care of the strange homeless
stray boy like she would a little brother, getting him fed and
bathed. Anti flees once he has the strength and opportunity, and
eventually does confront Yuta, only for the Neon Genesis crew to warn
him that if he kills Yuta as Yuta, he’ll never get the real fight
with Gridman that he desires, which pushes Anti’s buttons well enough
for him to retreat.
Having failed to get Yuta/Gridman
killed yet again, Akane decides to approach him, taking him out to
dinner and trying to convince him to join forces with her. From her
perspective, this should work, but Yuta is quite reasonably
resistant, and horrified that she’s killed their classmates and such
for such petty reasons, giving us a view on their difference in
perspective and scale: to Yuta, the victims of the Kaiju attacks are
people; to Akane, they aren’t. Neither is strictly incorrect (though
you could say that Akane is in the wrong), but their points of view
are essentially irreconcilable.
Alexis Kerib also shows up, ‘in the
flesh’ for once. It’s actually quite funny, in a sort of surreal
way, because he walks into the restaurant like it’s nothing and chats
pleasantly enough with Yuta while looking the part of an
eight-foot-tall dollar store Darth Vader. Shortly after, a Kaiju
attack begins, and Alexis reveals he let Anti try his hand at design,
creating a kaiju to attack alongside. Yuta, of course, Gridmans up
and takes on Anti and his personal monster, destroying the latter and
driving off the former, who’s punished harshly by Alexis with Akane’s
leave, seeing as she’s livid at the idea of someone else having made
a proper kaiju.
Her next play is, oddly enough, to
announce her plan of attack, declaring when and where she’ll unleash
a Kaiju attack. Rikka, however, feels strongly that rather than just
preparing to fight, they should talk down Akane, and ultimately she
gets the boys to go along with trying.
While there had been some previous
indication of a friendship between Rikka and Akane, it had been
fairly low-key until now, and I think that’s a good thing, because
they start pushing Rikka’s warm feelings towards Akane after the
reveal, and we as the audience have to ask the question: does Rikka
like Akane and want a peaceful solution with her out of her own free
will, or does she only feel that way because she’s one of Akane’s
NPCs at heart?
Ultimately, Akane can’t be reasoned
with at this stage, and some clever planning sees the disaster she’d
hope to cause averted and her Kaiju killed by Gridman, at which point
she starts sinking into depression over her inability to defeat
Gridman.
The episode that follows is a
“Something completely different” scenario where Rikka, Utsumi,
and Yuta are trapped in dream states produced by Akane (through a new
kaiju. When Akane does anything that a normal girl couldn’t, just
assume the answer as to how is “with kaiju”). Rikka relives her
early days having met Akane, Utsumi a scenario where he and Akane
became friends over their mutual nerdy interests, and Yuta
experiences a world that begins just like the first episode, with him
waking up with amnesia, except Rikka doesn’t exist and Akane has
taken her place. Eventually, all three manage to break out of the
dream, rejecting first its artificiality and then Akane’s rather
earnest pleas to just stay with her, leading to Gridman’s appearance,
the Kaiju battle, and the end of the episode. A frustrated Anti also
gets told off by the Calibur, or at least told that Gridman won’t
fight him because he’s a person with a real heart, Kaiju form or no.
Moving onward, the Neon Genesis crew
tries to convince Anti to find a new purpose in life, exercising his
free will while Akane, now deep in a slump owing that she’s been shot
down by her own creations, doesn’t even seem to be trying, sending
out a lame Kaiju that Gridman slays quickly and easily… though this
doesn’t trigger a reset. A much more threatening kaiju in terms of
power, though very rough and malformed in terms of its appearance,
emerges from the corpse some time later and goes on a rampage,
presumably courtesy of Alexis Kerib. It runs through the city,
slaughtering the background Kaiju, and even proves to be too much for
Gridman alone. Anti, however, appears and takes on a new,
Gridman-like form that gets called Grid Knight and finishes the foe
off. However, with the background Kaiju dead, there’s no longer the
force that reset the city, and everything just continues with the
Kaiju attack as “canon”. In the midst of this, Akane pays a
visit to Yuta and the others (somewhat mirroring an earlier attempt
of theirs to call at her home, which caused them to encounter an
otherworldly vista also seen when flying too high above the sky box).
Akane, then, stabs Yuta with her
sculpting knife. She doesn’t actually manage to kill him, and the
act seems to drive her deeper into her despair. This leaves Yuta
unconscious in the hospital, the city in chaos, Akane depressed and
unable to do much of anything, Alexis throwing her prefab old Kaiju
into battle, and Anti holding the line while we wait to get Gridman
back.
Ultimately, Yuta wakes up, and we get
the reveal that he isn’t really “Yuta” but latent Gridman using
Yuta’s body (and presumably an imprint of his personality, given the
attachment to Rikka. It’s also here that we learn it had to be Yuta
because, since he liked Rikka, Akane didn’t ‘own’ him) while Yuta
prime, with all his old memories, is just kind of sleeping through
the mess so Gridman can do his thing. I guess as payoffs for the
usually lame “Amnesia” scenario it’s as good as any. He goes
full Gridman and fights side by side with Anti against the recycled
Kaiju, while Rikka seeks out Akane. Rikka manages to find Akane, and
has a good conversation with her where Rikka tries to support Akane
as a friend despite the terrible things she’s done and Akane, blinded
by her depressive breakdown, holds that it’s just the NPC in Rikka
talking… but before any emotional resolution is reached, Alexis
arrives to ask Akane for more Kaiju. Since she’s at a low enough
state to be unwilling or unable to provide, Alexis just decides to
use her instead, forcibly turning her into the final boss monster.
Gridman-as-Yuta rescues Rikka, and Anti
fights the sorrowful wreck of his creator, extracting her from the
hulk only to get stabbed by Alexis, who absorbs Akane’s power to
become super and giant himself. Gridman and Alexis fight, but Alexis
is feeding off Akane’s negative emotions, so as long as she’s in her
black hole of grief and self-loathing, Alexis is unstoppable. This
leads to your typical “power of heart” sort of ending where
Gridman uses an unpresaged repair power to fix the city, and along
with Utsumi and Rikka calls out to Akane and gives her a big speech
about how she needs to face her fears and is strong enough and
worthwhile and doesn’t need a perfect world to be loved… you know
these speeches, there are a million of them, this one is alright and
has the intended effect of freeing Akane and depowering Alexis so
Gridman can defeat him and stuff him in a prison device.
From there, we get the denouement:
Gridman and the Neon Genesis Junior High Students (who are, in a
sense, parts of him) depart, letting the real Yuta awaken as they
take Alexis Kerib away to face whatever transdimensional judgment is
coming to him. Anti, it’s revealed, survived, and has been picked up
by the weird Kaiju girl from earlier, indicating that she might
herself be an outsider and willing to induct Anti into her ways of
living as a world-hopping kaiju. And, Akane also prepares to leave.
Recall, the city was her refuge – even before the show, she was
hiding from something, and the dark emotions that Alexis preyed on
and she was forced to confront came from there. She says some
pleasant farewells from her friends, and leaves the world she made
without a need for gods.
And, from that, the last scene – last
shot – of SSSS Gridman is possibly the most interesting: we’re
treated to a live action moment where a girl (presumably Akane)
awakens in what appears to be modern Japan, in a room full of
Tokusatsu, Kaiju, and Trigger memorabilia to face an ordinary day.
This serves to suggest that, in a sense, what we’ve seen is the dream
of an ordinary person, dealing with ordinary stresses, and is why
when discussing Akane’s morality I brought up the idea of having a
lucid dream. On the other hand, this dodges the normal problem with
“all just a dream” or “reset” endings in that we KNOW that
Akane’s dream city isn’t ‘just’ her dream the way we would think of
that. The world continues existing after she departs (we see enough
to know that) and there are outside forces that not only don’t obey
Akane’s wishes, but never seemed to do so to begin with, existing
totally independent of her – Gridman, Alexis Kerib, and the weird
Kaiju girl serve to ground the show and maintain its stakes and drama
even after we contextualize Akane as nothing more malicious than a
person going through unknown rough times, and makes the ending of
redeeming her and convincing her to face life a little more powerful
since we can guess at the kind of life that she has to face rather
than leaving it as esoteric god nonsense. Perhaps there’s even the
idea that she might be a little special, like Alexis Kerib couldn’t
just use any child’s dream. All in all this forces us, right at the
end, to really consider the multiversal implications of SSSS Gridman,
and how everything might tie together, and what these forces mean for
other worlds that blur the lines between reality and dreaming. At
the same time, it also answers questions, explaining why lore and
culture from our world – including directly naming the Ultra Series
– is infused into Akane’s private mental shelter.
SSSS Gridman is, in my opinion, exactly
what you want it to be if you want it. It’s a love letter to
Tokusatsu, with all the glorious cheesy stuff you would expect; it’s
full-bore Trigger mania, launching us headfirst into strange vistas
and big ideas held together by colorful and likable characters and
madcap energy; and, as something that must by its nature address
media as a thing, it manages to provide smart and thought-provoking
metafiction elements rather than a hollow acknowledgment of its
forebearers.
But it’s an odd one to rate because I
feel like you must already be a fan of Tokusatsu, if not the Ultra
Series itself, to really get the most out of SSSS Gridman.
Personally, I came in without a lot of knowledge of the Ultra Series,
but with an encyclopedia knowledge of Showa and Heisei Godzilla, and
all the tropes of monsters, robots, aliens, and rubber suits therein,
which was enough. But if you’re a newcomer to the genre, and aren’t
really familiar with everything that’s great and everything that’s
goofy about Japanese special effects bonanzas? I feel like you’re
going to miss a lot of the enjoyment. There’s no particular required
watching, no reference you simply must catch, but it’s still not
going to be kind to the uninitiated.
There’s one other flaw I have to
mention: Yuta and Rikka are, by Trigger standards at least, boring.
Utsumi has the energy, Akane is a joy to watch, Anti is a weird
sourpuss, the Neon Genesis Junior High Students are the classic
crowd of one-note but still fun characters. But our leads, and
critically our kind of lead couple, have very little going for them
as people and very little going for them in the way of chemistry.
It’s not a fatal problem, and they at least do and say a few
interesting things each that put them ahead of REALLY lame
protagonists from other shows… but when everybody else is chewing
the scenery, the scenery itself kind of chews those two up instead.
For these reasons, I’d judge SSSS
Gridman to be worth an A-. It’s smart, it’s fun, and it’s
well-constructed, but it could also be difficult to access, difficult
to parse, and easy to get lost in. Still, if you have any affection
for Kaiju battles, I’d give it a watch, and enjoy the ride.